The present invention relates to packaging materials and in particular to material used to stuff and fill shipping cartons and crates to protect small, valuable or fragile articles.
It will of course be recalled that it was common to use newspaper and/or excelsior material to wrap and embed small, valuable and fragile articles in shipping cartons or crates. Such material was in fact unclean, being themselves basically waste products. In addition they required manual handling to insure proper stuffing. Recently, such material were replaced with shaped foam plastic boats into which the articles being shipped were securely held. Even more recently, foamed plastic pieces or "Peanuts" (so named because their shape resembled the edible variety) have become common.
Foamed plastic "Peanuts" had the advantage of being light in weight, and of relatively incompressible and undeformable during use. On the other hand foamed plastic "Peanuts" have considerable disadvantage in that they are more expensive than paper and are non-biodegradable. They thus create an environmental waste problem and health problem. Foamed plastic Peanuts are extremely difficult to handle because of their small size and light weight so their collection and disposal is rendered difficult. They also present a significant storage problem in that large masses must be kept on hand, pending their use.
It is an object of the present invention to provide packaging and stuffing material, useful as a substitute for the plastic peanut that avoids each of the foregoing disadvantages while retaining each of the advantages.
In particular, it is the intention of the present invention to provide packaging stuffers which are highly biodegradable, to therefore remove any threat to the environment.
It is another object of the present invention to provide "peanut" substitute which are more economical and easier to handle.
These objects as well as others will be apparent from the foregoing disclosure.